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With his father keeping the press at a distance, Edward Hakim leaves his sentencing hearing on Monday. ROBERT J. GALBRAI

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Jolicoeur case should be a lesson: Experts

Speeding in urban context different than highway context

DAVID JOHNSTON
The Gazette
Thursday, April 10, 2008

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With his father keeping the press at a distance, Edward Hakim leaves his sentencing hearing on Monday. ROBERT J. GALBRAI

Even a slight reduction in the speed at which Edward Hakim was travelling before his car hit and maimed Patricia Jolicoeur in St. Lazare in 2006 would have greatly reduced the chances of severe injury to her, say road-safety experts.
Those experts say the Jolicoeur case, while tragic, needs to be seen as a lesson in what a big difference even a small reduction in vehicle speed can make in terms of personal injuries and material damage.
At Hakim’s sentencing hearing in Valleyfield on Monday, the prosecution said accident-reconstruction experts estimated that Hakim’s Buick was 25 metres away from Jolicoeur when he first noticed her walking her dog in front of him.
Those same experts determined that he was travelling between 55 and 65 kilometres an hour when he first saw her, in excess of the posted 40-kilometre-per-hour speed limit on residential Yearling St.
Hakim pleaded guilty to dangerous driving last September, after a deal in which two other original charges of hit-and-run and criminal negligence were dropped. The prosecution said Monday it wants a 30-month federal jail term; the defence is recommending 15 to 18 months served in the community. Quebec Court Justice Michel Mercier will hand down his sentence April 23.
Road-safety experts said Hakim ordinarily should have been able to decelerate down to a relatively harmless impact speed had he been respecting the speed limit that fateful night in November of 2006.
In support of this contention, Ottavio Galella, an engineering consultant with Trafix Inc., based in Old Montreal, calculated the braking distance required to bring a car to a full stop as a function of vehicle speed.
His findings show that had Hakim been travelling at 30 km/h, which is the speed limit in some suburbs adjacent to St. Lazare, he could have come to a stop within 26.2 metres; at a speed of 40 km/h, 37.6 metres is required. That’s more than 25 metres, but at least he could have slowed to well below 30 km/h upon impact. Eighty-five per cent of pedestrians hit by cars below this speed survive their accidents. At 50 and 60 km/h, the respective braking distances to a full stop are 50.5 and 65.3 metres, Galella said. These figures are for dry asphalt in good conditions, and assume a normal reaction time after initial perception of an accident risk.
Though she survived, Jolicoeur was left paralyzed and with severe brain damage. She is being fed through her stomach at the chronic-care home where she now lives in Pointe Claire.
In the case of Hakim, he had been driving behind a friend’s car on Yearling, a two-way residential street, before hitting Jolicoeur. Witnesses saw Hakim pull out into the on-coming lane as if he were trying to pass the car in front of him. It was while the two cars were side by side, the court determined, that Hakim first noticed Jolicoeur.
Crown prosecutor Elise Maldemay downplayed the element of speed, characterizing 55 to 65 km/h in a 40-km/h zone as “over the limit, but not excessive.”
Road-safety experts expressed dismay over Maldemay’s trivialization of the speed issue, but said it speaks to a general public tendency not to think urban speeding is a problem. But experts said there is a big difference between the urban context and the highway context. In urban settings, there are pedestrians, cyclists, parked cars and sharp twisting roads to contend with.
“Your pedestrian fatalities are almost always in the urban setting,” said Ray Marchand, general manager of programs for the Canada Safety Council.
Marchand, who is based in Ottawa, cited Australian research showing two cars – one travelling at 60 km/h, the other at 65 km/h, or only a 5-km/h difference. Even when these two drivers start braking simultaneously, the first one is still travelling at a speed of 32 km/h after a few moments of deceleration, while the second one is down to 5 km/h. That’s a 27-km/h end-result difference upon impact.
The reason for this huge variation is that a driver’s final five metres of braking distance reduces his speed fully by half, Marchand said. A slightly lower vehicle speed at the beginning, then, in a typical urban setting, can give a driver just enough extra braking time to make a difference between life and death.
Only five per cent of pedestrians confronted with an impact speed of 60 km/h or more survive their injuries.
It wasn’t made clear in court this week what the speed of impact was in the case of Jolicoeur. But what is clear is that Hakim tried unsuccessfully to swerve around Jolicoeur, rather than make braking his priority.
Marchand said it is a common impulse of young drivers to try to swerve rather than reduce speed when faced with a potential risk of collision.
It’s not always the best tactic, he said. Good driver education can teacher people when swerving is the right choice, and when braking and holding a straight line of course is better, Marchand said.
“If you try to swerve and don’t succeed, the penalty is very high,” he said. “But if you just brake, the risk of collision is still high, but the potential penalty will be much lower.”